WWII veteran finally gets medals he earned more than 70 years ago

A 95-year-old World War II veteran in Kansas has finally received medals he deserves.

“I didn't know I had most of these, because when I came out of the Army in '45 shortly after the war, they were turning us loose so rapidly, all they did was give us a discharge and send us on our way,” says 95-year-old Harold Curry, who served in the military during World War II.

“My father found his discharge papers a couple of months ago, and when we were reading through them, we realized that there were some medals listed that he didn't really know that he earned,” said Carna Curry, his daughter.

“We saw in there, there were two bronze stars that I didn't know about because I never read my discharge at all. I had been overseas for 38 months, and I gave the Army a lot, but I was out, and I left it alone,” Harold explained.

On Tuesday, he was presented with the medals that were rightfully his after his family did some investigating to get his military records and figure out what precisely what he was owed.

“He had applied a few years ago to get his medical records, and he was told there had been a fire at the St. Louis archives, and a lot of the records for the military had been destroyed, so we put in an application to see if they could find those if they really were destroyed, and apparently the congressman received word that, yes, they were destroyed, so the paperwork that we supplied them will now go into the archives,” Carna added.

Friends and family gathered in his living room to watch him receive his medals after more than 70 years.